Common use of Business Continuity and Contingency Plan Clause in Contracts

Business Continuity and Contingency Plan. We have a comprehensive business continuity program in place, which we review, update and test on a regular basis. The plan provides for continuation of client service in the event of various types of interruption to our facilities and services, with the understanding that we cannot plan for, safeguard or guarantee against all contingencies. Our policy is to respond to significant business disruptions by safeguarding employees’ lives and firm property, making a financial and operational assessment, quickly recovering and resuming operations, protecting all of the firm’s books and records, and ensuring that our customers can continue to transact business. Examples of potential scenarios that might cause some changes to our regular business operations: • A power outage due to the power company being unable to supply electricity at our primary facility for almost any reason should not disrupt our service to our customers • We maintain a primary location and a back-up facility in separate locations for our data servers and our customer service operations, and, in an emergency, can conduct relevant operations from separate locations although, depending on the circumstances, on a reduced scale (in some cases, a much-reduced scale). Account access would be made available through the back-up location, if necessary. • External threats or damage to our primary facility would cause us to transition to our back-up facility with some disruptions to services we will make best efforts to minimize. No contingency plan can eliminate all risk of service interruption or impeded account access. We assess and update our plans to mitigate risks. In creating our Business Continuity and Contingency Plan, certain assumptions have been made such as alternative facilities being accessible, sufficient personnel being available, and external organizations including securities markets and government agencies being operational. If these assumptions are not valid under particular circumstances, we will evaluate possibilities for minimizing the disruption to services feasible at that time and will promptly provide clients with information about how to access their funds and securities. We update the Business Continuity and Contingency Plan to reflect changes to our business processes, technology, and staff, and continue to post a summary of it on our website. You may also obtain our current Business Continuity and Contingency Plan summary by submitting a written request.